Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept

Abstract

The conceptual evolution of borders has been characterised by important changes in the last twenty years. After the processual shift of the 1990s (from border to bordering), in recent years there has been increasing concern about the need to critically ques- tion the current state of the debate on the concept of borders. Within this framework, this article explores the critical potential of the borderscapes concept for the development of alternative approaches to borders along three main axes of reflection that, though interrelated, can be analytically distinguished as: episte- mological, ontological and methodological. Such approaches show the significant potential of borderscapes for future advances of crit- ical border studies in the era of globalisation and transnational flows, thereby contributing to the liberation of (geo)political imag- ination from the burden of the ‘territorialist imperative’ and to the understanding of new forms of belonging and becoming that are worth being investigated.